Student Profiles: Richard Urban

PhD student Richard Urban has taken a passion for cultural institutions and a love of technology, and woven them together to create a fascinating career, and now a course of study that involves him in cutting edge research into cultural heritage digital preservation. Though he's come a long way from writing BASIC programs and mastering the public library's Apple IIe, he admits much of his success is due "to the fact that adults couldn't figure out how to program their VCRs."

He spent the summer after earning his BA in history from Penn State as a Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress. Since then he's worked at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, the Historical Society of Delaware, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Collaborative Digitization Program. He earned his MA in history with a Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Delaware in 1997.

Urban was living in Washington in the mid-90s, just as the Internet began to grab the public's interest. One of Urban's housemates was building some of the first websites for NASA. Along with his roommate, Urban began working on something equally as important: a website that listed all the wineries in the DC area. Though fame and fortune eluded him (this time), he took the technical skills he learned and built some of the first web exhibits as part of his exhibit management class. These initial web exhibits were examples of how technology and information studies intersect with museum studies, an intersection that has proved to be Urban's calling.

Urban has the unique perspective of having begun his studies as a LEEP student, and then moving to Champaign to complete his coursework on campus. In both settings, Urban appreciates the sense of community fostered by both GSLIS students and faculty. "Not only are my fellow students supportive, but the faculty are extremely welcoming and make students feel that they are as much collaborators as they are students," he explained.

Urban is involved with the ECHO DEPository project at GSLIS, a major research project funded by the Library of Congress. The project is a collaboration between GSLIS, the UI library, NCSA, OCLC, the Perseus Project at Tufts University, the Vincent Voice Library at Michigan State University Library, and state libraries from Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Each of these participants are working together to evaluate the best systems for digital preservation. Urban's role has been to work with digital audio from WILL radio in Urbana . He is also exploring how to use metadata standards to manage digital materials once they are in a preservation repository.

Urban earned his master's degree from GSLIS in 2006. With his doctoral studies he hopes to "continue the research I've started about practices for cultural heritage digitization and information sharing, particularly within the museum community. I hope this research will allow me to contribute to defining what the field of museum informatics looks like in the future."

August 2006

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